The bone ash sifted through Captain Geng’s armored fingers like gray snow.
Behind Geng, twenty golden-armored executioners stood in two disciplined ranks, their four-pronged axe-spears held upright. The silence inside the dark rock gorge was total. It was broken only by the crackle of smoldering timber and the gurgle of the nearby river.
Geng unclipped a backup instrument from his belt. A brass star-compass housing nine black glass needles suspended in quicksilver.
“Lord Chu Rong warned me that country scholars are clever,” Geng said softly. He turned the bronze dial with his thumb. “He said you were fond of ledgers and fine print. But you forget, Scholar Lin—the earth can hide a corpse. But it can’t hide a thousand beating hearts.”
The needles in the quicksilver twitched.
They slowly swung away from the burnt melted rock waste piles, orienting directly downward at a thirty-degree angle toward the dry riverbed, pointing straight at the underground drainage channel where Patriarch Tie and three thousand blacksmiths were retreating.
“Underground drainage channels,” Geng murmured, a cruel smile touching his lips. He raised his hand toward the twenty executioners behind him: “Calm distance! Prepare ground-shaking earth-breaker lances. We’ll drill through the bedrock and drown the rats in their own sewer.”
